Pope Francis on his Ram 1500 Popemobile in Latvia in September 2018.

Preservation

A few weeks ago Pope Francis took his final ride in a white Ram 1500. Folks online noted that the Vatican went to the effort to have the bed welded to the cab, but didn't find a longer bed so that the casket wasn't hanging on to the tailgate. Going through pictures from this article, it looks like the short bed ram was a regular Popemobile repurposed for the funeral, a fittingly practical end for an especially humble Pope.

The Popemobile is a fairly recent concept, especially given that the lineage of Popes began with one of Jesus' disciples and a Popemobile wasn't in frequent use until the end of the 1970s. Before the invention of the automobile the Pope was carried in public in a chair called the Sedia gestatoria or driven in a horse-drawn carriage.

Graham gifted the Vatican their first automobile, a Graham-Paige 837 limousine, in 1929. But the first vehicle to be officially considered the beginning of the concept of the Popemobile was a Mercedes-Benz Nurburg 460 Pullman gifted to Pope Pius XI in 1930.

But it wasn't called the “Popemobile” in its day. Wikipedia:

The term "popemobile" was first used in English-language media to refer to a custom-built Lincoln Continental used by Pope Paul VI during a pastoral visit to New York City in 1965. After the visit, the car was sold to Fort Dodge, Iowa eye doctor Eric Swanson, who promoted it as the "Pope-Mobile" and loaned it for other uses, including ticker-tape parades for the Apollo astronauts.

They weren't used very often until Pope John Paul II began using them in 1979. For a time after an assassination attempt there were some that enclosed the Pope in bulletproof glass, but most are open top white vehicles with a platform for the Pope to be seen by gathered crowds. Sometimes there is yellow trim or a stripe, or a symbol of the Vatican on the hood or grille.

Following that basic pattern, a wide variety of vehicles have been Popemobiles but are still recognizable as such. The list includes a Star 660 truck, Fiat Campagnola, a Mercedes-Benz M-Class, Seat Panda, a GMC Sierra, Jeep Wranglers, a Dacia Duster, Fiat 500L, Isuzu D-Max, and an electric Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen.

Laborghini even gifted Pope Francis a white Huracán with thin gold stripes in 2017. Not an open-top car, not technically a Popemobile, it's still a kind of honorary Popemobile. As it was not Pope Francis' style, he blessed it and had it auctioned off. It brought $950,000 at Sotheby's in 2018.

It's interesting that it's become such a symbol of the Papacy in such a short time compared to the institution it represents. But it's been in use longer than I've been alive, so my generation and those that came after have always known Popes in Popemobiles. Media have access to events where they can photograph the Pope in the Vatican or at a meeting, where most of the Catholic masses' pictures of the Pope are a glimpse of a waving man standing atop a platform in a white car.

The Conclave to choose the next Pope convenes May 7th. Not being religious myself, I'm most interested in seeing what the next Pope does in the way of parade transportation.

History Beyond the Bumpers

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.

Auctions are a genre of enterainment unto themselves. Storage Wars was a fun watch until the patterns made it obvious how staged it was. Millions of people tune in to Mecum or Barrett-Jackson every year. Bring a Trailer doesn't have the live video, but the drama is still there.

Recently I've been watching a 1955 Pontiac Chieftain restomod that sat at around $2000 for four days. Yeah, most of the activity happens right at the end, but most cars like this usually have $5000 or $6000 opening bids. Was it because it was a Chevy engine and low profile tires on a classic Pontiac?

I made the mistake of telling my family about the car, so my sister-in-law put a bid on the car and worked out a max bid with my wife because they knew I wasn't going to. That definitely made the auction a little nerve-wracking. Why weren't people bidding? Was I missing some flaw in the photos and description? Did people just hate the build and would I look like an ass if I won it? Was it a scam listing, and being only a casual observer I was missing it?

Bidding activity picked up in a big way after a few more photos and videos were posted by the seller, and it just sold for $35,000. To someone else, thankfully.

I first noticed the auction when it was posted on Bluesky, but I have the BaT app on my phone now, and I've started a watchlist to get an idea of what some other vehicles will sell for. For anything less than $10K that Pontiac would have been an incredible deal, but if I'm going to spend more I want to get something more my style. Meaning not red or any other bright color. My watchlist has a couple of green pickup trucks and a white minivan.

So, I guess Mission Accomplished for my family, I'm finally really looking for my first real classic vehicle. And I understand the gambling-like emotion of bidding on a vehicle you've only seen in pictures!

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about the printed materials in The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.

Before the Berne Convention, copyright in the United States used to have requirements that the work include a copyright notice published in a certain way. Newspapers, event programs, advertising, and such “ephemeral” works often didn't bother, because people were unlikely to copy old news, info on past events, or advertising for someone else's product. Sometimes notice would be included, but not correctly.

Film, book, and music publishers learned the hard way with high profile cases. It's a Wonderful Life was considered public domain for a long time due to a missing notice, and would probably be a long-forgotten shelf filler were it not for broadcasters playing the royalty-free film every year for generations. The underlying story and musical score are copyrighted, and they have asserted control over the film.

Night of the Living Dead is another high-profile example.

Night of the Living Dead entered the public domain because the original theatrical distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, neglected to place a copyright indication on the prints. In 1968, United States copyright law required a proper notice for a work to maintain a copyright: U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 92, Copyright Law of the United States of America, Chapter 4: Copyright Notice, Deposit, and Registration, Omission of notice on certain copies and phonorecords. Image Ten displayed such a notice on the title frames of the film beneath its original title, Night of the Flesh Eaters, but the distributor removed the statement when it changed the title. The restored version released on home media by The Criterion Collection is under copyright by Image Ten, Inc.

Well, newspapers and programs and advertising flew under the radar until archivists got a hold of the internet. We dig through book sales, flea markets, and antique shops for things that weren't legally copyrighted in the years between all of the works being expired and all of the works being copyrighted regardless of notice.

It turns out, after finding another box of early 80s issues of Grand National Scene, that the publishers got the notice wrong. I'm not sure how many years are eligible, but there should be a lot of good content from the early years of the Dale Earnhardt-Darrell Waltrip rivalry, as well as stories on just about every NASCAR driver and team in the garage.

As part of redoing the inventory includes noting which books, newspapers, and magazines I can go back and scan once I'm done, I'll have a better idea of how many issues are out of copyright when I've inventoried them all.

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

The five most popular pages for the month of April (not counting basic index pages) were...

Article: The tricks to resetting a Dodge Grand Caravan Computer

Topic: Mercury Cougar

Article: F150 Wheel Offset Explained | The Haul

Topic: Chevrolet C30

Topic: Pagan's Motorcycle Club

About The Crittenden Automotive Library

The Crittenden Automotive Library @ CarsAndRacingStuff.com, based in Woodstock, Illinois, is a free online collection of information relating to not only cars, trucks, and motorcycles, but also the roads they drive on, the races they compete in, cultural works based on them, government regulation of them, and the people who design, build, and drive them. We are dedicated to the preservation and free distribution of information relating to all types of cars and road-going vehicles for those seeking the greater understanding of these very important elements of modern society, how automobiles have affected how people live around the world, or for the general study of automotive history and anthropology. In addition to the historical knowledge, we preserve current events for future generations.

The Library currently consists of over 900,700 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 58,100 individual articles, more than 18 days of video & 24 days of audio, more than 36,100 photographs & other images.

About The Crittenden-Walczak Collection

The combined personal collections of John Walczak & Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 1,527 different book volumes/editions, 3,551 unqiue periodical & catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 382 hours of video.